The Return of the Prodigal IT-shnik

Brain drain is an almost epochal problem. In Russia, it is customary to scold the state for three things: fools, bad roads and for the fact that it, dear, does not appreciate our golden youth at all. The golden one is not in terms of the amount of money in parental accounts, but in terms of brains and professional skills.

By the middle of the XX century, the emigration of bright minds in search of a decent life began to take incredible turns. Then it was difficult to assess the scale — only decades later, when our compatriots were making discoveries in medicine and technology abroad, it became clear what irreplaceable people Russia had missed.

We remember who left so as not to return, and explain why the situation is changing dramatically today.

(6 photos in total)

Who have we lost?

In 2011, the Pruffi recruitment agency compiled a list of IT losses in Russia with the highest "nostalgia rating" - those who could move the industry in the country, but preferred to change their native expanses to foreign shores.

Probably, most of all, Russian IT will miss Sergey Burkov, who at the time of the move worked as the head of Google Moscow R&D Center. In 2008, Sergey moved to San Francisco.

In 2005, Maxim Boguk, one of the most respected system architects in the world, emigrated, and in 2010— his colleague Ivan Zolotukhin. In 2006, Andrey Andreev, CEO of the dating service Badoo, "fled" from the harsh labor reality from Russia. In the same year, Vasily Chekalkin, who worked on Yandex communication services, and Alexey Medvedev, who today holds the post of chief programmer at X360, went to Sydney.

At that time, Russia could be called a "digital province" with a stretch, and specialists were attracted by the possibility of career growth and exorbitantly high salaries in foreign currency.

What has changed

Until recently, the magical foreign country really attracted Russian IT specialists. Now the situation is changing in our direction. Firstly, the level of salaries — visiting specialists were taken, albeit on relatively high salaries, but they definitely lost to local professionals in terms of the amount of money they received. Now that technological development has finally reached a certain level, salaries for IT specialists in our country are comparable to the money that these same specialists receive in the West.

Secondly, now the IT industry is perceived as a real sector in the Russian economy, which in the future will help this economy to get off the oil needle. That's why the demand for professionals is much higher than the supply. Today, in addition to the financial sector, agricultural business and logistics have started investing in IT dramatically. So if mom insists on telling someone, "Go study to be a programmer," she is absolutely right.

Last but not least, in Western companies, programmers mostly work on one narrow task and they do not have the opportunity to go beyond or use some kind of creative approach. In Russian companies, everything is much simpler in this regard — IT specialists have their hands free and they are almost always given carte blanche.

Anton Bannykh, a graduate of ITMO University, worked at Google London, and then returned to Russia; now he works for the Russian company Jetbrains, which makes software for programmers

According to Anton, the Russian company has a competitive salary, and life in Russia is much cheaper than in London.

Anton is currently working on creating a new Kotlin programming language. On May 18, at its I/O developer conference, Google announced that Kotlin is becoming the official language for Android software development.

How do young programmers break through?

In fact, just like any other specialists, it is to loudly declare yourself.

Back in 1970, in Texas, in addition to fairs and cowboys competitions, a computer science competition was launched. Since 1977, the competition has become the Olympiad of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), was named ACM/ICPC and has been held every year since then. To understand how large this championship is, it is enough to find out the number of participants: this year 46,381 programmers took part in ACM/ICPC (including regional qualifying tournaments). For comparison, 11,544 athletes participated in all stages of the Summer Olympic Games in Rio.

University students or first-year postgraduates can take part in the championship. They compete in teams of three. People over the age of 24 are not allowed to participate in the competitions.

The most interesting thing is that until 2000, Russia had never won the championship. And over the next 16 years, our students took 11 prize cups. At the same time, for the last five years, the title of the winner has been roaming between two Russian teams — from St. Petersburg State University and ITMO University. The latter is considered advanced in the field of preparing students for sports programming.

Vladimir Vasiliev, Rector of ITMO University

Make Russia great again

Despite the obvious successes of Russian young programmers, they face obstacles that they themselves are not able to overcome. According to the portal cnews.ru , a Russian programmer who took second place in the British competition for developers Data Science Challenge, was denied the required monetary reward. A few days after the announcement of the results, Vladimir Iglovikov, a programmer from St. Petersburg, received a letter in which the organizers of the contest "regretfully" reported: we cannot recognize the winner, as well as give out a prize, due to your Russian origin.

It turned out that one of the rules of the competition states that residents living in countries with a low corruption penetration rating of Transparency International cannot participate in it.

"Science should be above politics. I really don't like this concept of judging, in which a scientist is evaluated not on merit, but by gender, age or origin," Vladimir wrote on his Facebook page.

Unfortunately, few people are able to influence the level of corruption in Russia. One thing is clear — young guys who are just entering the path of sports programming competitions need support. ITMO students have won a total of 6 times during the entire time that Russia has participated in the championship — and this is a world record: the closest foreign rivals, the American Stanford and the Chinese Jao Tong University, have only 3 championship cups.

By the way, today in Rapid City (South Dakota, USA) the final of the 2017 Olympics is being held. The main battle of programmers involves 13 Russian teams (and a total of 133 teams from around the world). And we sincerely hope that the victory will be ours again.